As to Alsace-Lorraine, the facts are known to be that it had belonged to
Germany until it had been taken, against the will of the people, by
France under Louis XIV., and it was returned to Germany as a matter of
right, more than three-quarters of the population being of German
descent and speaking the German language.

But let me ask in return, Mr. Eliot, when did ever in her political
career England consult the will of the people when she took a country?
Can he say that, when England tore the treaty of Majuba Hill, like a
"scrap of paper," and made war on the Boers? Did she consult the people
of Cyprus in 1878? Does he know of any plebiscite in India? Has she
consulted the Persians, or has France consulted the people of Morocco,
or of Indo-China, Italy the people of Tripoli? Since Germany has not
acted here in any other way forty years ago than all the other nations,
why does Dr. Eliot consider the American people justified in taking
anti-German views for reasons of such an old date, while he forgives the
nations of the party he favors for much more recent infringement of his
rule?

"Americans object to the violation of treaties." So do the Germans. We
have always kept our treaties, and mean to do so in the future. The fact
with Belgium is that her neutrality was very one-sided; that, as can be
proved, as early as the 25th of June, Liege was full of French soldiers,
that Belgian fortifications were all directed against Germany, and that
for years past it was the Belgian press that outdid the French press in
attacks against Germany. But I can give Mr. Eliot here some authority
that he has so far not challenged. When Sir Edward Grey presented the
English case in the House of Commons on the 3d of August he declared
that the British attitude was laid down by the British Government in
1870, and he verbally cited Mr. Gladstone's speech, in which he said he
could not subscribe to the assertion that the simple fact of the
existence of a guarantee was binding on every party, irrespective
altogether of the particular position in which it may find itself at the
time when the occasion for acting on the guarantee arises. He called
that assertion a "stringent and impracticable" view of the guarantee and
the whole treaty a "complicated question." So Mr. Gladstone, and with
him Sir Edward Grey, has held the Belgian neutrality treaty not binding
on every party, when it was against the interest which the particular
situation dictat